A lyrical and important coming-of-age novel.
In this debut novel set in 1990s Harlem, a young girl learns—and redefines—what it means to take up space.
Eight-year-old Malaya Clondon weighs 168 pounds. It’s also true that she is Black, that her family recently moved from a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side to a brownstone uptown, and that she attends Galton Elementary Academy for the Gifted, but her weight seems to be the most important fact about her to most of the people around her. It’s what her classmates see. It’s what leads her mother, Nyela, to monitor Malaya’s food and take her to Weight Watchers meetings. And it’s what prompts her grandmother Ma-Mère to suggest that Malaya get gastric bypass surgery. Only a couple of close friends and Malaya’s father recognize that there is more to her than a number on a scale and unruly desires. By high school, she will have a larger circle of friends. She finds solace and joy in the rhymes of Biggie Smalls. And she discovers a new sense of style as she builds a wardrobe inspired by the rappers she sees on MTV. But she still hungers for experiences that she believes are reserved for thin girls—a hunger that becomes more complex when her best friend, Shaniece, becomes a thin girl herself. In an effort to meet this need, Malaya will acquiesce to sexual experiences that bring her no pleasure, just a hint of what it feels like to be wanted, before she begins to explore what it truly is that she, herself, wants. Sullivan writes with tenderness and uses the language of poetry to communicate her protagonist’s inner life. In difficult moments, Malaya escapes into fantasy, and she uses drawing and painting as emotional outlets. But what begins as dissociation evolves into a more confident relationship with her art, just as Malaya will ultimately learn to inhabit her body with a sense of license and possibility. She decides to let go of the shame Ma-Mère passed on to Nyela, and Nyela passed on to Malaya, and not measure herself in terms of fatness and thinness but in terms of “the smallness of a body against a broad scape of mountains” and “the smallness of life in the big, busy world.”
A lyrical and important coming-of-age novel.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-09141-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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